The August 29 issue of the Journal will include the first in a series of review articles on critical care. Critical care is a young specialty that is generally considered to have developed from the successful use of invasive ventilation during the 1952 polio epidemic in Copenhagen. In his report of the response to that epidemic, Ibsen described much more than the use of invasive ventilation; he...

Health information technology (IT) has become an important part of current medical practice, especially in critical care services. One significant advance is the use of telemedicine which was initiated in Thailand nearly two decades ago. Telemedicine is also used in the intensive care unit or, what has been termed the “Tele-ICU”. It has evolved as an alternate paradigm linking the intensivist a...

OBJECTIVES Cost-effective programs are needed to assist homeless persons with severe mental illness in their transition from shelters to community living. The authors investigated the cost-effectiveness of the critical time intervention program, a time-limited adaptation of intensive case management, which has been shown to significantly reduce recurrent homelessness among men with severe menta...

Critical care encompasses elements of emergency medicine, anaesthesia, intensive care, acute internal medicine, postsurgical care, trauma management, and retrieval. In metropolitan teaching hospitals these elements are often distinct, with individual specialists providing discrete services. This may not be possible in rural centres, where specialist numbers are smaller and recruitment and reten...

A study was undertaken in southern peninsular state of India, the Tamil Nadu State, to assess the farmers’ “Willingness to pay” (WTP) for receiving annual health care services to their dairy animals. The districts of the state were categorized as “Livestock developed” (LD) and “Livestock under developed” (LUD) based on initial base line developed. Contingent valuation (CV) approach was used to ...

BACKGROUND Growing numbers of critically ill patients receive prolonged mechanical ventilation. Little is known about the patterns of care as patients transition from acute care hospitals to postacute care facilities or about the associated resource utilization. OBJECTIVE To describe 1-year trajectories of care and resource utilization for patients receiving prolonged mechanical ventilation. ...